Synod

God be with the days, as my old friends Brian Brindley and Brian Hanson used to say, when at General Synod, the House of Laity and the House of Clergy were not so divided on this question of the Anglican Communion canonising it's own saints, and not just the usual favourites of red canon left leaning PC politics such as Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela or Oscar Romero or John F Kennedy  because they were democrats who hated police officers, but rather some more solid figures such as Catherine of Aragon, Cardinal Wolsey, Charles I, Henry VI founder of Eton, as the Rev Simon used to say. Anyway, House of Clergy is neocon, while House of Laity is low-church n anti-canonisation, despite the groundswell of feeling among the flocks. Clergy say that the House of Laity is too upper class and too remote from the vast majority of Anglicans who never did stomach the Lutheran and low church bilge for very long, esp under the ethnic cleanser republicans of Cromwell. No the English, Welsh, and Scottish people like their saints and refused to accept the German bilge about them.

Edmund

Golly gosh, I might have been a barrow boy from Smithfields when I was younger, but even I can be convinced of the pleasanter things in life with an invitation to some huge posh pile of limestone in the country to play croquet on a lovely lawn. Very nice indeed. Which is where we are this weekend. And while I am horsing around with the Duchess, lo and behold, I bump into a young ordinand to be, like a scene from Mansfield Park. He hopes to be ordained soon. I presume to give advice. He hopes to be ordained into a larger more catholic Anglicanism. I concur. I tell him that just as the little barque of Anglicanism floats in a grander n larger sea of international Catholicism with all of it's many rites and spiritualities, so too a larger more "catholic" Anglicanism is on the cards nowadays. It will be important to be both evangelical and institutional, just like the new world catholic clergy - and to be all things to all men, so as to win many to Christ. 

Rip

So the infamous first preacher of hate in the west goes up to the pearly gates this week to meet his just judge .... And also he wil meet shock surprise ... all the rats n vermin he hoped would not be there ... Maybe he will be ensconced within a high walled enclosure so as not to see all the working classes. Still, friends, Romans, countrymen, we come not to praise Caesar but to bury him. In the end he had a near death experience and realised that the real Jesus was quite nice n that life is about acceptance of others ... Even zealots like nathaniel. 

Swimming the Tiber - 2015 style

Dull thuds and groans and the odd screech from the dungeons of HMS Catholica methinks. The catholic bishops of the Real Church of England are getting tired of the lifestyle issues increasingly raised by the Ordinariate types and are beginning to crank up their siege engines on our ordinands all going over to them. One of their number explained it to me very simply and extremely tidily - like he was fresh from afternoon tea in a certain convent with a certain notorious German Sturmhaubitzer 42 Kardinale Kesselring - "You see Reverend, it is all very simple; Holy Mother Church has been reflecting of late since lots of young boys and girls before they swim the Tiber - mother river of Ancient Rome - and come over are allowed to date young men and women and generally have a social and romantic life with impunity while within the good old charming easygoing Anglican Church of England. Lots of parties, lots of dates, lots of romantic dinners for two in the dim lights of Oxford dining rooms - all very nice. But some of those that plan to come over opine with their few remaining gay friends that have already come over that the catholic codes of canon law do not apply to gays because the 6th commandment about adultery obviously only has men in mind who are attracted to women and to married women at that." I raised an eyebrow in the Pearse Brosnan mode. "But," he explained, "mindful of the directions of the Holy Father, we are now of a mind and it is our desire now, after the dust has settled with these high profile and exciting conversions, to remind such young men and women that a promise of celibacy befits the holy estate of ministers of God's sanctuary and that the codes apply to gays and straits alike. No strait will be punished without some gay also being punished for harming the holy rule of holy celibacy." The British catholic Church of England bishops are wise in this matter in elaborating first of all in 1994 the doctrine of the distinction between orders and ministries; then in 1998 the doctrine of feminine and male ministries; and now in 2015 soon to be the doctrine of the equivalence of straitness and gayness and subjecting both sides to the constraints and blessings of the holy rule of celibacy. So some attention now to embarking on the desert road to desert fathers and desert caves s'il vous plait. All change at the next platform. 

Golly

Golly surprise surprise, no riots this summer in old London town. Am shcoked and bemused - there must be a decline in the usual kind of old red canon in the city. Popped into a vicar in the countryside the other day and he was explaining that he gives the local children All Things Bright and Beautiful and reminds them that all is as it should be - a nice quietening influence is his lordship the country bumkin vicar - and the kids seem to enjoy it all. No dawkins lovers among the kids that is for sure - except for the oddity at the back of the class - I imagine Dawkins used to spend his days at school hiding in the stock cupboard trying to prove he was normal and not a carry-in and carry-out sort of ineffectual teacher's pet. Yes London town is very quiet - none of the usual dark black moods hanging over the city nor the expected rivers of blood that we usually have this time of year during the long hot summer of a 79 as Tom Robinson used to put it so quaintly in the heydays of revolutionary fervour among our dear west indian friends. Yes, very quiet. Mmm I must pop over to Woolwich and visit one of the local barracks there as London is supposed to be a garrison town.

Rev Simon IV

Historically our role in the Church of England was always one of conservation and preservatism - we pulled the huge old bird away from the private interpretation lunacies of the low church, non-church, non-hieratic protestant hasidics of Bucer and Calvin and the insane Zwingli - not even Luther in all his disrespect for the imperial power of the papal states denied certain catholic dogmas as dogmas. Still who knows maybe dear old Justin has a point in pushing the bounds of revisionism at the moment. It seems that a new framework and a new imposition is necessary for christening robes and the like, a new design maybe, as most moderns have no concept of what all the old biblical commentary means, except maybe Ratzinger, and even he and his german friends can look ridiculous as they pump out endless shavings and split hairs on Genesis 2 that most modern cosmic britons do not accept as anything but absurdly subjective psychological poetry. And nobody in modern Britain accepts the old stuff about either Adam or the old serpent and the old Nick because they have not had anything like a nice modern cosmic format for all that evil within the home planet. Too many old evangelicals and catholics pursuing old hat about a subject that needs a general over-arching rewrite. Is there a doctor in the house?

Rev Simon III

Rev Simon the other night - "Ah - the old Church of England used to believe in these things; the devil, the soul, original sin of Adam and Eve, and especially the vestments of office; but christenings are being reviewed and revised out of religion into PC secular protestant low church what-knot ville a la Geneva circa 1610. Nowadays it is all aboard the Trans-siberian express to the good ship HMS Nemesis waiting for all the poor working class christians at Vladivostock harbour, to be escorted to a glorious future of marzipan and dry white wine by the old cruisers, the HMS Aurora and the HMS Potemkin, not that Dr C was not recruited by elements of the old KGB at university and then turned into a "turner" once he had penetrated into the heart of the red canon system of the old Church of England. So once all these happy little christian working classes are busily piped on board and given peanuts and sparkling rose to quaff on board, then their ship will set off for a promised land, much promised to the "ignorant" little tikes that still believe in the virtue of religion, and thence. Oh stop there. This is not right. This is not in the script. The ships are not sailing for a promised land of happiness and peace and freedom from intrusion, invasion, and ridicule; but for China. To communist China full of total revisionism and endless communism, and they won't be feasting with joy on marzipan; no these poor little tikes will be put in concentration prisons for anti-communists. No what a shame; oh well, it is no change at Party Headquarters." Such would be the general write-up in the ordinary somewhat churlish and antique old fashioned secular GB papers at the mo - as per Judy and the non-churched girls in The Mail. But is the learned Dr Welby planning a more exciting future for us all - assisted by her britannic majesty and her new young crowd of fans?